Have you ever wondered what’s really going on when your digital marketing team or Google Analytics account talks about conversion rate? Here are the basics for what the SEO metric means for your online presence.

Understanding Conversions

To understand how your conversion rate is a helpful indicator for your site’s success, we must first understand what conversions are. They are, in fact, generally the point of having a website for your business. Conversions refer to when a user completes a desired action on your site. This may include filling out a contact form or making a purchase.

The significance of conversions is determined by the goals you set for your site. To that end, conversions can be further divided into two categories: micro and macro conversions. Micro conversions indicate that a user is interacting with your site in a way that likely precedes fulfilling your goal. Macro conversions occur when the goal is achieved.

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For example, if your goal is to make a sale on your site, micro conversions may include users watching a video about your product or subscribing to a newsletter. The macro conversion would be when a sale is made. Your goals can vary, including conversions like completing a contact form or becoming a paid subscriber, but they are always reflected in macro conversions. Both subsets of conversions matter and help your business grow.

What Is Conversion Rate?

A site’s conversion rate makes monitoring the progress of conversions more accessible by illustrating how users are engaging with your site. In fact, many consider it one of if not the most important component measuring SEO success. It allows businesses to see which of their marketing strategies are yielding the desired results so they can either emphasize helpful ones or alter ineffective ones.

Conversion rate is presented as a percentage. It is calculated by dividing the number of conversions by the total number of visitors to a site. This ratio is then multiplied by 100 to give a percentage: (#conversions/total number of visitors)*100

Google Analytics keeps track of conversion rates and allows owners to set goals accordingly. Your goals should reflect what you think will help your business grow, in general as well as online. In a cyclical way, this allows you to adjust your SEO strategy to highlight things that are already working and change things that are not.

What Is a Good Conversion Rate?

In order to know what a “good” rate is, it is important to remember what they represent. If your rate falls around 5.5%, that means that 5.5% of the visitors to your website are interacting with it in a business-generating way (making a purchase or joining a mailing list). While that seems very low—only 5.5% successful—5.5% is actually quite a good rate. The “good” target range for conversion rates is 2–5%. This varies across specific industries, but it is a good place to start.

To understand this, you have to keep in mind that a high percentage of users only visit sites casually, maybe to quickly scope out information or even to come back later when they are ready to commit. Even if those users are not ready to buy or sign up for something, you can keep track of the keywords that brought them there to find out what SEO strategies are working and capitalize on them.

As you review your rates to see if they are good, be aware that rates are highly dependent on three factors:

Type of industry (consumer goods, information technology, finance, etc.)
Audience demographic (age, occupation, income, etc. )
Conversion goal (checkout completions, ad clicks, newsletter subscriptions, etc.)

How Can You Increase Your Conversion Rate with SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing websites to rank highly among search engine results. The world we live in relies on online marketing or at least having a strong online presence to make a business successful, and the goal of SEO is to rank as highly as possible so people can find your organization.

There are a truly overwhelming number of SEO metrics you can track to see how your business is performing, but it is helpful to begin with just a few, including conversion rate. As mentioned earlier, keeping track of your rate can help you discover which of your other SEO strategies are already effective.

In turn, the search engine optimization strategies you adopt can strengthen your rate, and this kind of big-picture and holistic approach can make an online business rock solid. In order to boost your conversion rate, consider implementing these strategies: